Hamilton Sees Armstrong's Long Road

The television in Tyler Hamilton's New York City hotel room didn't carry the Oprah Winfrey Network. That was a little bit of a problem. So on Thursday night he went to a friend's apartment, where, like three million or so estimated viewers, he watched a tense Lance Armstrong confess, finally, to using performance-enhancing drugs.

Hamilton wasn't a viewer hoping to hear the truth. He knew the truth about Lance Armstrong, because it was also the truth about himself. Hamilton carried his ugly truth like a heavy bag for many years, doing shameful things to hide it. He'd told many lies, until, not long ago, he decided to stop telling lies. With co-author Daniel Coyle, he'd written a book called "The Secret Race," about his years as an elite U.S. cyclist alongside Lance Armstrong, and his experience using drugs in the pro ranks. When the book came out, Hamilton was blasted for his past deceptions, but he knew what he had done. He knew the book was the truth.

And now here on his friend's television was Lance Armstrong, his former teammate turned adversary, sitting across from Oprah Winfrey in a hotel chair in Austin, Texas, beginning his own slow, defiant, maddening confrontation with the truth. Armstrong's predicament was far larger than Hamilton's—Armstrong was a seven-time Tour de France champion and global celebrity, the biggest name the sport had ever seen. But like Hamilton, he ran from reality until he couldn't run anymore.

"It was an odd experience," Hamilton said Friday morning on the telephone. "I can't say I was looking forward or excited about this. It was a weird position for me to be in. I'm not like the general public. I've known the truth since 1998."

Still, Hamilton said he was riveted as the interview began with a drumbeat of yes and no questions from Winfrey. Armstrong, tense but displaying little visible emotion, told Winfrey that yes, he'd used banned substances in his career as a cyclist. Yes to EPO, to blood doping, to testosterone/cortisone/human growth hormone. He said he'd used PEDs in all seven of his Tour victories.

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"Super powerful," Hamilton said of the interview's opening minutes. "My jaw was on the floor."

From there, Armstrong's TV interrogation went wide and personal. The reviews have not been charitable to the disgraced champion. Armstrong has been criticized for giving incomplete, tentative answers or no answers at all on some of Winfrey's questions—and for a perceived lack of remorse over damaging personal attacks against his accusers. There was a sense that Armstrong, while admitting some things, was still spinning, still evasive.

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Decades of Doping

Photos: Armstrong's Cycling Career

Hamilton had sounded like this, too, when he first began confronting the truth. Hamilton's own admission had been much smaller in scale, but in the early stages it was also painful, awkward, halting, often incomplete. Coyle, his co-author, said that when he first began talking to Hamilton for "The Secret Race," Hamilton's answers came so slowly he could transcribe every word and comma easily, by hand, with no abbreviations.

"When I first started telling the truth, it came out like water trickling out of a faucet," Hamilton said.

That's what Hamilton recognized in Armstrong—the slow, brutal process of a man coming to terms with his deception. Coyle recognized it, too. "People underestimate how difficult it is to tell the truth when you have lived a secret life for a long time," Coyle said. He compared the process to digging out a "buried city in the sand."

"This isn't like a syringe in a toilet stall," Coyle said. "This is a life. With people and all these plotlines and secrets that are interlocked and nested together."

Hamilton wasn't trying to diminish the magnitude of Armstrong's life of deceit, or his own. Nor was he unaware of the pain Armstrong inflicted upon those who dared to counter his narrative. Hamilton knew Armstrong's fury well. He'd experienced that fury himself. Profoundly. Armstrong was in no mood to discuss Hamilton with Winfrey. He told her he hadn't read "The Secret Race."

But that wasn't what stuck with Hamilton. What stuck wasn't words but the way the words were coming. Hamilton said the interview wasn't a big step or a tiny step –just a first step. He said Armstrong would get better at talking, because that's what happened to him. He hoped Armstrong talked to agencies like United States Anti-Doping. He felt this was necessary and would help the sport. But he also believed that over time, it would help Armstrong.

"Secrets suck," Tyler Hamilton said. And he knew this to be the absolute truth.

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